‘Teach Peace’; ‘Give Peace A Chance’; ‘Say No to War’; ‘Imagine Peace’; ‘Coexist’. We in the West live surrounded by platitudes of peace. What could be more noble than to teach peace to our children? To try to eliminate human conflict? To imagine a peaceful world? To live in harmony with people of different beliefs?
These are seemingly noble aspirations but are they always so? For example, were they noble when they were used by peace groups in Europe and the United States at the end of the 1930s to try to keep Western countries from opposing Germany and Japan? Such aspirations are decidedly ignoble when the groups who mouth them use them to debilitate those who fight against evil in the world. And can anyone seriously doubt that evil exists and must be confronted? That we do have enemies both foreign and domestic? Yet so-called “peace groups” in the West are infiltrating every aspect of our lives with political correctness—a ‘platitudinal’ disease that seeks to render us incapable of defending our values against those who would take them away.
In my opening paragraph, I posed the question of what is more noble than aspiring to those peaceful platitudes? What is more noble is to confront evil in the world and defeat it—thereby creating a world in which those platitudes might take hold.
The current enervated Western response to Islamic evil (and, yes, I believe that evil does emanate from Islam) is indicative of our degradation as a culture. It is a degradation that the leaders of Israel must be cognizant of as they continue to carry the fight to the Islamic enemy. For Israel cannot afford to live in a world of peaceful platitudes—not if it is to continue to exist.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.
